Talari Networks Announces Software Upgrade for WAN Appliances

Features include a new off-board network management system (NMS) that provides visibility of the Talari network.

Wide area network (WAN) reliability and application quality specialist Talari Networks announced APN 3.0, a major upgrade to its adaptive private networking (APN) operating software to support its family of Mercury WAN appliances.
A key feature of the updated platform is the presence of dynamic conduits, which allows for the automated build up and tear down of a meshed network that reacts to changing traffic demands by creating best-path, multi-link tunnels across private or public Internet access links. All paths and links are monitored on a sub-second basis for quality, including the new ones, to ensure latency has been decreased.
The company said with dynamic conduits, network managers don't have to anticipate traffic patterns and they can ensure adequate bandwidth exists for critical traffic and no sessions fail. The software builds a dynamic tunnel between those locations in real-time, allowing traffic to bypass some hops to decrease latency as traffic from location to location exceeds bandwidth policy reservation thresholds or failures are detected.
"With APN 3.0, Talari has again raised the bar for heterogeneous WAN management and optimization," Peter Christy, research director of networking at IT analytics firm 451 Research, said in a statement. "With the latest Adaptive Private Network features, IT managers see the entire WAN and are assured of performance, quality and reliability providing business and network continuity while enabling easy-to-manage and cost-effective cloud computing, BYOD, real-time interactive applications, server centralization and remote office connectivity."

Other features include a new off-board network management system (NMS) that provides visibility of the Talari network, devices and all links, allowing network managers to visualize traffic patterns, quality issues and network outages, and single point configuration, which alleviates the need to configure each device within the network or to manually anticipate changing network demands. Talari's WAN appliances communicate with one another to build an image of the network, the possible paths through the network, and the latency, loss and jitter of each path, a company release noted.

"To achieve even close to the same functionality offered by APN 3.0, a company would have to overlay several technologies and do the necessary configuration to make them all work together. For example, the dynamic conduit capability with bandwidth reservation and automatic failover included with APN 3.0 could be accomplished by setting up dynamic VPNs, RSVP and a failover technology," Donna Johnson, director of product marketing at Talari, said in a statement. "However, without the single configuration point and comprehensive visibility provided by Talari's network views, each of these capabilities and technologies would have to be configured correctly on multiple devices throughout the network."
The operating software will be generally available in July and accessible through the Talari Customer Support Portal as a free upgrade for existing customers and the NMS will be sold as an optional add-on product. A company release also noted APN 3.0 will be fully compatible with a wide range of popular network management and reporting tools.